Film titles, despite their brevity, can condense the content of films or hide part of this to arouse the public’s interest about the movies. Given its importance in relation to the commercial success of films, these titles, however, have not gained comparable importance in Translatology. This thesis has intended to apply a functional model for analyzing the translation of animation film titles from English to Chinese.
After Chapter 1, which is an introduction, in Chapter 2, we examine the limited research devoted to discussing the movie title translation to come to concentrate us in the functional model of Nord. In order to take into consideration the iconic aspect of the movie titles in our analysis, we take advantage of the paratranslation theory for proposing a new concept, the movie microtitle, to refer to the title, tagline and image printed on the poster of a given film as a whole. In Chapter 3, we review the history of the importation of animation films in mainland China and we sketch the figure of the responsible for titling the mentioned films with a presentation of the Chinese norms on such activity of titling. In Chapter 4, we first detail the laborious process of data collection and then we present our quantitative and qualitative methodology for analyzing the movie microtitles catalogued in our three corpora recently constructed. Before enter into the analysis, in Chapter 5, we enumerate the parameters related to the realization of the functions of movie titles. Afterwards, according to the methodology of analysis established in the former chapter, we carry out the individual analysis of the movie titles in each of our three corpora and then the comparative analysis between them. In Chapter 6, we give our final conclusion and suggest some possible ways to continue the current work. We finish this thesis with an appendix of the norms of censorship in mainland China and the appendix of our three corpora of movie microtitles, followed by the reviewed bibliography.